Competitive Clientelism and the Political Economy of Mining in Ghana
In: ESID Working Paper No. 78. Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
In: ESID Working Paper No. 78. Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
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Working paper
In: Third world thematics: a TWQ journal, Band 5, Heft 3-6, S. 206-220
ISSN: 2379-9978
In: Critical social policy: a journal of theory and practice in social welfare, Band 41, Heft 2, S. 270-293
ISSN: 1461-703X
Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme has been widely characterised as 'home grown'. This article challenges such accounts of the LEAP by showing how donors used their financial muscle to shape the LEAP both at the level of programme adoption and implementation. However, the extent to which donor interests and ideas influenced the programme's design and implementation depended on the degree to which such interests were aligned with those of domestic political elites. While it was donors who first pushed cash transfers on the agenda of the Ghanaian government, electoral calculus took centre stage in driving the programme's subsequent expansion and institutionalisation. The article suggests the need to move beyond the donor-driven versus state-led type of arguments to explore the complex ways in which transnational factors and the formal and informal aspects of domestic politics interact to produce different levels and types of commitment to social protection in Africa.
In: ESID Working Paper No. 82.
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Working paper
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 115, Heft 458, S. 44
ISSN: 0001-9909
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 115, Heft 458, S. 44-72
ISSN: 1468-2621
World Affairs Online
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, S. adv071
ISSN: 1468-2621
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 118, Heft 472, S. 553-579
ISSN: 1468-2621
The success of Kenya's garment export sector relative to other African countries challenges a growing pessimism regarding the prospects of devising and implementing industrial policy in contemporary Africa, particularly in contexts characterized by Competitive Clientelism. Kenya became sub-Saharan Africa's fourth largest exporter of garments by value during the last two decades, catching up with major players like Lesotho and South Africa while converging on the two largest exporters, Mauritius and Madagascar. Nuancing existing explanations for the sector's growth, which emphasize external factors like trade regimes and donor interventions, this article assigns a central role to the state and the balance of power that underpins it. The interests of key actors within Kenya's political settlement aligned in a way that allowed the country's Export Processing Zones (EPZ) programme to be relatively insulated from political pressures, giving the Export Processing Zones Authority (EPZA) sufficient autonomy and coordination capacities to administer a highly-conducive business environment for predominantly foreign garment firms. However, while the sector's employment and foreign exchange contributions have ensured ongoing political support, the resulting increase in garment firms' holding power has made them more assertive in demanding policies that are not only decoupled from learning processes, but detrimental to other industry players.
In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 118, Heft 472, S. 553-579
ISSN: 0001-9909
World Affairs Online
In: Comparative political studies: CPS, Band 51, Heft 1, S. 76-104
ISSN: 1552-3829
This article examines how parties use clientelism in competitive and uncompetitive electoral environments. It argues that parties enjoy wide discretion to target clientelistic payoffs to inexpensive voters in their strongholds, but that head-to-head competition compels them to bid for more expensive voters. Empirically, it uses a list experiment embedded in a postelection survey to study electoral clientelism in Lebanon, a country with a mix of competitive and uncompetitive electoral districts. It finds respondents underreport clientelistic transactions by a factor of two. Proxies for the cost of a vote explain payoff targeting decisions in party strongholds, but lose their explanatory power in the competitive districts.
In: Comparative political studies: CPS, Band 51, Heft 1, S. 76-104
ISSN: 1552-3829
World Affairs Online
In: Pacific affairs: an international review of Asia and the Pacific, Band 93, Heft 3, S. 497-518
ISSN: 1715-3379
The dominant literature on Cambodian politics over the past two decades suggested that a mixture of elite and mass clientelism had enabled the hegemonic Cambodian People's Party (CPP) to rule via competitive but authoritarian elections, while lessening its previous reliance on repression and violence. Such explanations did not predict the upswing in contestation in the country in 2013 and thereafter. Neither do they account for the crackdown that followed. Following literature that draws attention to the tensions in building and maintaining political coalitions under authoritarianism, and demonstrating the difficulties in maintaining competitive authoritarianism over time, this article draws attention to structural, institutional, and distributional impediments to the CPP leadership in building and maintaining effective reciprocal relations with electoral clients while simultaneously balancing the interests of the military and other elites at the core of the regime. To make its argument, the article compares weaknesses in the CPP's electoral clientelism with the effectiveness of patronage within the security forces, seen through the lens of Cambodia's experience of land dispossession. It shows that an extractive and exclusive political economy privileged the interests of regime insiders over potential mass electoral clients precisely during the same period the CPP was supposed to be securing its hold on power via mass electoral clientelism. This further explains why the regime fell back on repression over reform in response to the upswing in contestation manifest from 2013, and why, despite the failings of its mass patronage project, repression has nevertheless been successful as a strategy for regime survival during a period of heightened popular contestation. (Pac Aff/GIGA)
World Affairs Online
In: ESID Working Paper No 107. Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre, The University of Manchester
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Working paper
In: ESID Working Paper No 104. Manchester: Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre, The University of Manchester, ISBN: 978-1-912593-06-4
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Working paper
This paper deals with the problem of political clientelism in Serbia broadly defined as the selective distribution of benefits (money, jobs, information, a variety of privileges) to individuals or clearly defined groups in exchange for political support. The main objective is to explain why political clientelism is widespread in Serbia and which key factors determine its shape and intensity. The explanation is based on the analysis of historical factors of development of clientelism in Serbia, as well as on analysis of data from a recent research on informal relations between political and economic elites in Serbia and Kosovo. The paper concludes that clientelism and informality have represented one of the structuring principles of socioeconomic and political development of Serbian society under the conditions of weak formal institutions and socio-historical heritage of late modernization. On the other hand, since 2000 economic and political sphere in Serbia became more open and competitive which influenced change in the character of clientelism in Serbia - the increased rivalry among different clientelistic (sub) networks heightened the chance of opportunistic defection even at the top level, which made political power of patrons more tradable and the relation inside the power network less asymmetric.
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